Transformer Fusion with Optimal Transport

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Imfeld, Moritz, Graldi, Jacopo, Giordano, Marco, Hofmann, Thomas, Anagnostidis, Sotiris, Singh, Sidak Pal
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866917646148042752
author Imfeld, Moritz
Graldi, Jacopo
Giordano, Marco
Hofmann, Thomas
Anagnostidis, Sotiris
Singh, Sidak Pal
author_facet Imfeld, Moritz
Graldi, Jacopo
Giordano, Marco
Hofmann, Thomas
Anagnostidis, Sotiris
Singh, Sidak Pal
contents Fusion is a technique for merging multiple independently-trained neural networks in order to combine their capabilities. Past attempts have been restricted to the case of fully-connected, convolutional, and residual networks. This paper presents a systematic approach for fusing two or more transformer-based networks exploiting Optimal Transport to (soft-)align the various architectural components. We flesh out an abstraction for layer alignment, that can generalize to arbitrary architectures - in principle - and we apply this to the key ingredients of Transformers such as multi-head self-attention, layer-normalization, and residual connections, and we discuss how to handle them via various ablation studies. Furthermore, our method allows the fusion of models of different sizes (heterogeneous fusion), providing a new and efficient way to compress Transformers. The proposed approach is evaluated on both image classification tasks via Vision Transformer and natural language modeling tasks using BERT. Our approach consistently outperforms vanilla fusion, and, after a surprisingly short finetuning, also outperforms the individual converged parent models. In our analysis, we uncover intriguing insights about the significant role of soft alignment in the case of Transformers. Our results showcase the potential of fusing multiple Transformers, thus compounding their expertise, in the budding paradigm of model fusion and recombination. Code is available at https://github.com/graldij/transformer-fusion.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_05719
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Transformer Fusion with Optimal Transport
Imfeld, Moritz
Graldi, Jacopo
Giordano, Marco
Hofmann, Thomas
Anagnostidis, Sotiris
Singh, Sidak Pal
Machine Learning
Fusion is a technique for merging multiple independently-trained neural networks in order to combine their capabilities. Past attempts have been restricted to the case of fully-connected, convolutional, and residual networks. This paper presents a systematic approach for fusing two or more transformer-based networks exploiting Optimal Transport to (soft-)align the various architectural components. We flesh out an abstraction for layer alignment, that can generalize to arbitrary architectures - in principle - and we apply this to the key ingredients of Transformers such as multi-head self-attention, layer-normalization, and residual connections, and we discuss how to handle them via various ablation studies. Furthermore, our method allows the fusion of models of different sizes (heterogeneous fusion), providing a new and efficient way to compress Transformers. The proposed approach is evaluated on both image classification tasks via Vision Transformer and natural language modeling tasks using BERT. Our approach consistently outperforms vanilla fusion, and, after a surprisingly short finetuning, also outperforms the individual converged parent models. In our analysis, we uncover intriguing insights about the significant role of soft alignment in the case of Transformers. Our results showcase the potential of fusing multiple Transformers, thus compounding their expertise, in the budding paradigm of model fusion and recombination. Code is available at https://github.com/graldij/transformer-fusion.
title Transformer Fusion with Optimal Transport
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.05719